Are Facebook frauding businesses?

Facebook have been tinkering with their algorithms in a bid to force small businesses to pay for adverts on their network. Of course, very few people are willing to do that and, almost overnight, everyone's stats, reach and figures dropped like rubber bricks in the deep end.

Others, meanwhile, forked out a bit of cash and watched their 'Likes' soar! However, something fishy was going on. We'll let this video explain as we wouldn't like to be the people who say 'fraud' and 'Facebook' in the same sentence without the certainty of this investigation.

If you didn't watch that video, the gist is this: some people pay for 'Likes' through dodgy means. You get a clickfarm to ramp up the amount of followers you have. Fake accounts, fake likes and more, all in exchange for a small payment. As these are fake accounts, there's not much in the way of interaction or usefulness. Paying dodgy clickfarms is simply an exercise in having a bigger number of followers and that's it.

What Facebook would like you to do is pay them and they'll legitimately help you reach more people. However, if you do that, the result is very, very, very similar to what you'd see if you went to a dodgy clickfarm.

So, what happens is, your stats go screwy, it makes your business look like it is getting less-popular and, thanks to Facebook throttling who sees posts in the first place, the whole thing is incredibly fishy. It is little wonder that small companies are looking elsewhere to promote their businesses (such as Twitter).

4 comments

2 years agoshiftynifty

It was never gonna be so with facebook, it is soo 2004, it`s hanging on by defrauding likes

Businesses might be turning to advertising on Twitter but the Promoted Tweets are having a negative effect. People typically react angrily and then block the business doing the promoting, since they feel it's an invasion of their feed.

Learned my lesson the hard way. I spent about $600 over a period of 3 months to promote my page and boost certain posts. When I got 1,000 Likes everything STOPPED. Out of the 1109 folks who Liked my page barely 13 of them see anything I post. So I fell for the bait and started boosting posts. Then something weird happened. An unboosted post said 1 person saw it but 4 of my friends liked it.
I would have been better off playing the lottery with the money I spent. Now I'm back to my own website struggling to figure out WordPress, using Instagram, Twitter and Tumblr to interact. Facebook is now a bunch of older folks playing Candy Crush.